INSIDE EYE OF AN OUTSIDER
Picture of an actor playing a picture-maker taken by a picture-making actor: Dennis Hopper’s candid portrait of “Blow-Up” star Devid Hemmings, 1968.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
DENNIS HOPPER’S FILM CAREER STANDS TODAY as one of the iconic cautionary tales about what happens when one’s talent enters into a death struggle with one’s demons. He was the contemporary of another troubled actor, James Dean, but instead of smashing himself to pieces in a car crash all at once, like his friend, he was destined to unravel slowly, over decades, like a hideless baseball wobbling over the rear fence, caroming from suspension to firing, from screw-up to royal screw-up. Every time the candle of Hopper’s undeniable gifts began to truly glow brightly, he’d get too close to it and burn his eyebrows off.
Today, Hopper’s long stretch as an actor, writer and director has largely been boiled down, in the public memory, to his creative energies on the era-defining Easy Rider, with many of his other near misses blurring into the haze of the unique amnesia that is showbiz’ permanent dream state. However, since his passing in 2010, it is his other output, the 18,000 images he made as an amateur photographer between 1961 and 1968, that have burnished his legend, making his informal snaps of life among the famous and anonymous of Los Angeles in the ’60’s the stuff of coffee table books and gallery shows. Gifted with a Nikon on his birthday in 1961, Hopper trained it constantly on the people he worked with, as well as those he would, sadly, never work with. The result is a portfolio that is as essential as Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood in its depiction of the dreams, excesses and delusions among the showmakers and the stars they spawned in that vanished decade.
Hopper’s 1962 portrait of fellow cineaste Andy Warhol.
During his life, various collections of Hopper’s work, including In Dreams and Photographs 1961-1967 were published in book form, and a comprehensive showing at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art accelerated interest among people who were only passingly familiar with his acting work. In the years since his death, his images have increasingly served as a time capsule for a Hollywood that was sandwiched between the end of the old studio system and the invasion of a younger generation of actors/directors that would include the Scorceses and Spielbergs of a new era. Hopper found a different kind of voice outside the world of movies, but one of his quotes about his first career seemed to portend the power of his second: “I was very shy, and it was a lot easier for me to communicate if I had a camera between me and people.”
FAB FOR THE TIMES
By MICHAEL PERKINS
OUR STORY BEGAN as I was recently rifling through early images of the Beatles, and marveling at the material objects the Fab Four spent some of their First Real Money on, like, as with many of us, so-called “serious” cameras.
Over the history of camera design there have been two distinct Halls of Fame, one being a “who done it first” roster of innovators and the other being more of a “who wore it best” list of brands that had the greatest success and/or reputation connected with those breakthroughs. Many camera makers both introduce and adapt, and some brands, even if they come late to someone else’s refinement, capitalize on them better than even its originators. And so it goes.
One company that sparked true innovation at its peak but saw its tech eventually adapted by names that eventually eclipsed it was Pentax, now known as a mere phantom shell brand under Ricoh but once a verrrry key player in camera design. Founded in Tokyo in 1919, Pentax began as a maker of lenses for eyeglasses and soon thereafter adapted its polishing and coating techniques to make entry into the camera lens field. By the early 1960’s, the 35mm camera had become universal as an amateur tool, but many things remained to be done for it to appeal to aspiring pros as well. Two such needs, for true through-the-lens focusing and simplified light metering, was being met by a few forward-thinking makers, and, among these, Pentax was the first to create a fully practical SLR, years ahead of Canon, Nikon and other contenders.
And so enter the Pentax Spotmatic, sporting a film advance lever (faster and easier than most company’s advance knobs), completely in-body metering function, compatibility with all M42 screw-mount lenses (offering a lot of choices across competing manufacturers) and a sleek, lightweight body. And here is where we, if you will, Meet The Beatles. The Fab Four, on their first American tour in 1964, were still in the habit of doing nearly everything as a group, and so Paul, George and Ringo all purchased new Asahi Pentax Spotmatics as their “real” cameras as they made their way across the states. Ringo in particular seems to have taken to the snapping hobby especially well, taking advantage of the hours the band spent sequestered in hotel rooms or sheltering away from their manic public by taking tons of candids that have recently come to light in special exhibitions and in the 2017 book Photograph. Most of the previously unpublished images were shot on Ringo’s Pentax.
The Spotmatic and its progeny proved to be an affordable, easily-operated workhorse within the Pentax stable for years to come, even as the company itself saw its innovations co-opted and perfected by other brands. Today, like many once-mighty names that have been purchased, re-purchased or hollowed out by new parent companies, this once-major player in the design sweepstakes deserves a hallowed place among those who made the creation of images easier, faster, and more reliable. Analog or digital, all design rises or falls on how it removes obstacles between the envisioning and the execution of an idea, as the world asks but one thing of its most beloved cameras:
“Please please me..”.
EYE FOOD
Even the smallest library on photography needs this book.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
A VIDEO BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN SZARKOWSKI, FORMER DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY for the New York Museum Of Modern Art, makes the salient point that most great photographers begin by being great fans of photography, almost to the point of studying the work of others as much as they work to perfect their own craft. This makes perfect sense. Before you can teach others to see, you have to learn to see yourself. And that begins with watching how other people see.
Learning from the masters doesn’t necessarily mean stealing from them, or even being stylistically influenced by them. What you see most importantly in other photographers is how closely their selves are married to how they personally take the measure of the world in visual terms. You learn how few real accidents there are, how few miraculous pictures merely pop out of the camera fully formed. You see the deliberate agency of art, the conscious decision to choose this in order to achieve that.
Szarkowski, who oversaw MOMA’s photographic collections and exhibitions from 1962 to 1991, bore witness as well to the first true acceptance of photography as an art unto itself, with a vocabulary, a power, a poetry separate and distinct from painting. Under Szarkowski’s tutelage, the great new personal photographers, from Garry Winogrand to Diane Arbus to Lee Friedlander, moved from the periphery to the center of popular culture.
Not content to merely designate work worth seeing, or providing it with a prominent platform, Szarkowski also edited and published two of the most important general-use guides to what all of us should look for in a photograph. His seminal books The Photographer’s Eye and Looking At Photographs, both comprised of works from within MOMA’s collections, examined more than just subject matter or technical data, looking at the motives, biases, objectives and visions involved in the making of pictures. Most importantly, both books placed known and unknown shooters on an equal par, making the study of the art about what is achieved, not just how, or by whom.
I cannot imagine having sustained a lifelong interest in making images if I had not first encountered the works of, among others, Pete Turner, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Larry Burrows, Richard Avedon, Berenice Abbott, Alfred Stieglitz, Art Kane, Weegee, Sam Abell, or Francis Wolff. Many of these people thrilled and inspired me. Sometimes they infuriated or shocked me. And sometimes they did all of that in the same moment. All have knocked me upside of the head and repeated, over a lifetime: Look here. Look closer. Look again.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you that photography is about technique, gear, luck or natural ability. You can work around all that stuff. But if you can’t see, you can’t show.
Study. Read. Admire.
Feed your eye.
thenormaleye 
I /WE REMEMBER IT WELL
By MICHAEL PERKINS
FEW WOULD DISPUTE THE IDEA that photography forever changed the way we see. However, I also believe it has altered the way we recall. The process of accessing our memories as a reference point for our thoughts and feelings was complex even before the invention of the camera. But add the seemingly “trustworthy” or “authentic” records of things interpreted by photography, though, and the sorting of memory becomes an even greater muddle. Do we remember, or do we recognize, through the inheritance of masses of images, how someone else remembered?
Through the camera, we can confuse our actual sensory experiences of things with the trove of pictures which formed our “versions” of them beyond what we ourselves have lived. Many more of us have viewed photos of the Eiffel Tower than have actually gazed upon it. When we do first encounter a “known” thing in person, one of our first reactions is often that it “isn’t how I pictured it”……that is, our collective photographic “memory” doesn’t match authentic experience.
As photographers, we are trying to see things originally even as we hack our way through the inherited gallery of images of those things that are an unavoidable element of our visual legacy from other photographers. It is damned difficult to develop our own eye, since the after-image of everyone else’s take is always present in our consciousness.
I shot the image shown here in 2011, during a typical package tour of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Part of the circuit was a brief shuttle ride to Ellis on a boat that afforded a long, wide view of lower Manhattan. I shot the picture quite unconsciously, which is to say, oh look at that cool view. Later, in combing through the day’s shoot, I saw something else in the scene, something that connected me to photographs taken generations before me: Alfred Stieglitz’ poignant scenes of newly-arrived immigrants in steerage: grainy silent newsreels of crowded ferries passing the Statue, their passengers’ faces etched with a mixture of terror, longing and joy. Suddenly my own picture was no longer about a pleasure cruise for tourists. It was my chance to take in the same view millions had seen before me: the first glimpse of The Promised Land. The New Start. The Second Chance. And for many, Life Itself.
I had already underexposed the shot somewhat to emphasize the skyline, but the picture still contained too many distracting features on the faces of the passengers. I adjusted the exposure even more and saturated the color to further create the look of a low-light, slow film stock. Their particulars muted, my tourists now replicated the “look” of all those earlier arrivals, the ones I had inherited from other people’s experiences. Had I reached a kind of communion with those millions? Could I be adding my own story to theirs?
Well….
Even though I was traveling in the same waters as the people in the archival pictures had traveled, I wasn’t them. As a native-born American, I didn’t face the terrifying pass/fail that they had as they approached our front porch. I wouldn’t come this close, see a life beckoning just beyond that window, and yet be sent back because my eye looked odd to the doctors or my papers were not in order. I found this picture again the other day. I think I have to live inside it for a while. I may not have shot it with the eye of someone new to this country, but the inherited images of lives past have asked me, in my own limited way, to bear witness to the fact that, at some time, we have, all of us, been The Other. I really don’t want to forget that.
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November 28, 2018 | Categories: America, Cities, Framing, Interpretation | Tags: Commentary, history of photography | Leave a comment